US military presence in South Korea has produced a system of state-sponsored prostitution Katharine H.S. Moon, Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies @ Wellesley College, 1997, “Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations”, 1997, Columbia University Press, Page 1-2 The selling and buying of sex by Koreans and Americans have been a staple of U.S.-Korean relations since the Korean War (1950-1953) and the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in Korea since 1955. It would not be far-fetched to say that more American men have become familiar with camptown prostitution in Korea since the 1950s than with military strategy and Korea’s GNP figures. Since the war, over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military. And millions of Koreans and Americans have shared a sense of special bonding, for they have together shed blood in battle and mixed blood through sex and Amerasian offspring. U.S. military-oriented prostitution in Korea is not simply a matter of women walking the streets and picking up U.S. soldiers for a few bucks. It is a system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the U.S. military). The U.S. military and the Korean government have referred to such women as "bar girls," "hostesses," "special entertainers," "businesswomen," and "comfort women." Koreans have also called these women the highly derogatory names, yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess). As this study reveals, both governments have viewed such prostitution as a means to advance the "friendly relations" of both countries and to keep U.S. soldiers, "who fight so hard for the freedom of the South Korean people," happy. The lives of Korean women working as prostitutes in military camptowns have been inseparably tied to the activities and welfare of the U.S. military installations since the early 1950s. To varying degrees, USFK (U.S. Forces, Korea) and ROK authorities have controlled where, when, and how these "special entertainers" work and live. The first half of the 1970s witnessed the consolidation of such joint U.S.-ROK control.
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The South Korean government facilitates this prostitution to encourage the US military to stay
Choe Sang-Hun is a staff writer for the New York Times. 1-7-09, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?_r=2&emc=eta1, The New York Times)
South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army. Bae at 29. Now 80, she lives on welfare and uses an oxygen machine. Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops. While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea’s own history. “Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview. Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that. But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency. “They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said. The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases. In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners. The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well. The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies. “If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.” The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which handles women’s issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes’ accusations. So did the American military command in Seoul, which responded with a general statement saying that the military “does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution.” The New York Times interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents. The documents do provide some support for many of the women’s claims, though most are snapshots in time. The women maintain that the practices occurred over decades. In some sense, the women’s allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea. Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world. Bae, 80, a former prostitute at an American base, covers her face in her room in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns. The women received some support for their claims in 2006, from a former government official. In a television interview, the official, Kim Kee-joe, who was identified as having been a high-level liaison to the United States military, said, “Although we did not actively urge them to engage in prostitution, we, especially those from the county offices, did often tell them that it was not something bad for the country either.” Transcripts of parliamentary hearings also suggest that at least some South Korean leaders viewed prostitution as something of a necessity. In one exchange in 1960, two lawmakers urged the government to train a supply of prostitutes to meet what one called the “natural needs” of allied soldiers and prevent them from spending their dollars in Japan instead of South Korea. The deputy home minister at the time, Lee Sung-woo, replied that the government had made some improvements in the “supply of prostitutes” and the “recreational system” for American troops. Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Moon back the women’s assertions that the control of venereal disease was a driving factor for the two governments. They say the governments’ coordination became especially pronounced as Korean fears about an American pullout increased after President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of American troops in South Korea. “The idea was to create an environment where the guests were treated well in the camp towns to discourage them from leaving,” Mr. Kim said in the television interview. Ms. Moon, a Wellesley College professor, said that the minutes of meetings between American military officials and Korean bureaucrats in the 1970s showed the lengths the two countries went to prevent epidemics.
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While prostitution is currently illegal in South Korea, it thrives because of U.S. military presence. Without a withdrawal of troops, neither government would put an end to the Camptowns. Dujisin 9, Zoltan, July 7 2009, “Prostitution Thrives with US Military Presence”, Inter Press Service News Agency, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47556
Since 1945, U.S. troops have been stationed in the Korean peninsula, with their current strength estimated to be 28,500. The country plunged into civil war between 1950 and 1953 and since then, U.S. troops have remained there, claiming to act as a deterrent against North Korea, the country’s communist neighbour. Prostitution in the region is a direct result of their presence, local observers say. Russian and Chinese troops also had troops stationed on the Korean peninsula in the aftermath of the civil conflict, but "have since left the area while U.S. troops are still here, in almost 100 military bases," Yu Young Nim, the head of a local non-governmental organisation which provides counseling, medical and legal care for sex workers, told IPS. Yu Young Nim’s office is located at the Camp Stanley Camptown, a few metres away from local Korean restaurants, home in the 1980s to U.S.-imported Kentucky Fried Chicken and Subway logos. Locals attest to the slow decay of a town. In front of one of these restaurants, sits a 36-year old former "mama-san", which in Korea denotes women supervising sex-work establishments. Like many other retired sex-workers, she looks older than her age, and has decided to open a restaurant. The "mama-san" prefers catering to U.S. soldiers instead of the more demanding Korean clientele. "G.I.s eat their food without complaints," she told IPS. "Koreans always expect to be served like kings." It was in camps such as these that a new dish called Pudaettsigae entered the Korean diet: Poor Koreans took ingredients such as sausage, beans, processed cheese from leftovers at the U.S. camp and mixed them with home-grown ingredients. After being a sex worker for much of her youth, during which she had a son with a U.S. soldier, like other "mama-sans" she opened her own club, where she employed other girls. She had to shut shop three years ago due to declining incomes. "If the base closes, I’ll try moving to the [United] States; it would be good for my son," she says. Her son lives in Korea and speaks the language well enough, but got his primary education in English. "I don’t think he could attend a Korean university, but the U.S. universities are too expensive for us." She could only wish his father was there to help. "I have some contact with the grandfather, but barely with the father. He doesn’t send my son gifts, not even a Christmas card. He has so much more money than me and doesn’t do anything for his son," she says. "My son [believes] he has no father." Several U.S. soldiers have married local prostitutes, in many cases impregnating them, only to later abandon them. "Even in those cases of couples living together, these women can be easily abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, and are victims of physical, mental and financial abuse," says Young Nim. "The women mostly come from broken families, backgrounds of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and there is no protection from victims of these crimes," he says. "After entering the prostitution business they can’t get out." U.S. officials have made statements condemning prostitution but have done little to stop it. "They think this system should exist for the U.S. soldiers. Superficially they stand for a zero tolerance policy but practically they know what is going on and use this system," Young Nim told IPS. There has been a reduction in prostitution of Korean women, which "has more to do with the work of non-governmental organisations and the fact that Korea has developed economically," while "there is no contact with the U.S. authorities. They have a legal office and counseling centre but only for their own soldiers and relatives." After the negative publicity, the top military officials of the U.S. army have slowly became more outspoken in their condemnation of prostitution.U.S. soldiers were discouraged from frequenting traditional entertainment districts in central Seoul, although locals say that did little to stop them. A turning point was the violent murder of a prostitute in Dongducheon in 1992. The finger of suspicion pointed at U.S. troops, though action against them is difficult given they enjoy a special legal status since 1945. While prostitution is illegal in South Korea, camp towns are practically exempted from crackdowns, and US military anti-prostitution policies have forced these places to minimize their visibility.
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The problem is endemic—forced prostitution will remain as long as the US military does Kirk and Okazawa-rey 1998-(writers for The Women and War Reader, “Making Connections Building an East Asia-U.S. Women’s Network against U.S. Militarism” New York University Press. http://www.gwynkirk.net/pdf/making_connections_paper.pdf
Participants shared the view that violence against women is an integral part of U.S. military attitudes, training, and culture. It is not random, but systemic, and cannot simply be attributed to “a few bad apples’ as the military authorities often try to do. We noted the many reports of rape, assault, and sexual harassment within the U.S. military that have come to light over the past few years. We also noted that U.S. military families experience higher rates of domestic violence compared to nonmilitary families. But the main emphasis of our discussion concerned crimes of violence committed by U.S. military personnel against civilians in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, especially violence against women, and the institutionalization of military prostitution. Crimes of Violence Women from all countries represented, including the United States, reported crimes of violence committed by U.S. military personnel against local women. Okinawan women emphasized violent attacks of women and girls by U.S. military personnel, especially the marines who are in Okinawa in large numbers. In May 1995, for example, a 24-year old Okinawan woman was beaten to death by a G.I. with a hammer in the doorway of her house. On their return from Beijing Conference in September1995, Okinawan women immediately organized around the rape of a twelve-year old girl, which had occurred while they were away. This revitalized opposition to the U.S. military presence in Okinawa and drew worldwide attention to violence against women on the part of U.S. military personnel. The National Coalition for the Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea, which comprises human rights activists, religious groups, feminists, and labor activists, was galvanized into action by a particularly brutal rape and murder of a bar woman, Yoon Kum E, in 1992. Korean participants commented that pimps and G.I.s try to intimidate the women against speaking out; women are also afraid of public humiliation. Drawing public attention to such crimes is embarrassing to the U.S. military. They are usually denied and covered up.
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Contention Two is Gender
Trafficking and forced prostitution denigrate women—treating women as commodities Enriquez 99, Jean, Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking In Women-Asia Pacific, “Filipinas in Prostitution around U.S. Military Bases in Korea: A Recurring Nightmare”, Seoul, South Korea, November 1999
CATW asserts that trafficking in women is inseparable with the issue of prostitution. The gender-based nature of trafficking exposes itself as serving the purpose of ensuring the steady supply of women to areas where men demand sexual services. We deplore trafficking and prostitution as violations of women’s human rights. We cannot consider it work, because among others, it compels women to perform acts that denigrates their person — their integrity as human beings. The impact to women of sexual exploitation is hardly healed by time. Amerasian children, estimated at 30,000, were born to Filipinas prostituted around the U.S. military bases in the Philippines. They receive no assistance from either the U.S. or Philippine government. Economically, ‘working in the clubs’ meant irregular earnings and slavery, as many of them would be withheld of their salaries or are fined for any ‘misconduct’. The women were abused physically, psychologically and emotionally. Some were murdered. With the Visiting Forces Agreement recently signed between the Philippine and U.S. governments, 22 ports will be opened to foreign troops and more women will be abused in the remote rural areas of the country. In Korea, our women are once again subjected to the same brutality. The same experiences continue to haunt our women. In Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere, the women are viewed as commodities to be bought, and being Asians, they are certainly perceived as less than human. Trafficking and prostitution have reached crisis proportions in the Asian region, with the entry and maintenance of foreign military troops, and worsening globalization of economies. The R & R policy of U.S. military and its surrounding industry rely heavily on the buying and luring of women not only in Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines, but more women from other countries including Russia, China and Thailand. Its twin menace, the unrestricted and globalized trade, rides on the continuing export of labor, as a convenient channel to traffic women for slave-like work or prostitution. Every month, 200-400 women and girls from Bangladesh are trafficked to Pakistan in the guise of labor migration. Yearly, 5,000 Nepalese women and girls are brought to India and Hong Kong on the same pretext. Currently, studies estimate that 150,00 Filipinas are exploited in the entertainment industry of Japan. More and more women from E. Europe are transported to the West and to Asia for prostitution. It might surprise many that Africa is also becoming a destination for trafficking. In 1992, 8 Filipinas were tricked that they will work as waitresses in Germany but were instead brought to clubs in Nigeria. Trafficking and prostitution, thus, need to be understood as problems arising from contexts not only of poverty and unemployment, but also maintained and promoted by economic interests and political policies that thrive on the subordinated status of women in our societies. As significantly, there are long-held definitions of masculinity, reinforced by the military institution, that are satiated by trafficking in women.
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Women in Camptowns are given quotas on their sexual performances and are trapped in a cycle of debts that prevents them from leaving, denying them the possibilities that are implicit in human agency.
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
There are two types of kijich'on prostitutes, the registered and the unregistered, or so-called streetwalkers. This book is about the first group of women, who are the governmentally recognized"special entertainers." Registered women sell drinks, dance with GIs, and pick up their customers in the kijich'on clubs. These women have more job security than streetwalkers because they have official sanction to sell their flesh. Moreover, they have a regular establishment from which they can attract customers, and they will not be hauled off to jail for prostitution, unlike streetwalkers, unless their official identification cards are invalid. In order to work in the clubs, a woman must go to the local police station to register her name and address and the name of the club where she will be working. She must also go to the local VD clinic, undergo gynecological and blood examinations and receive a VD card. To maintain her status as a"healthy" hostess, she must go once a week for VD examination and get her card stamped"healthy" by the clinic;"healthy" means she is free of VD infection. She pays for each clinic visit, and if she fails the exam, she cannot work in the club-- she must also pay for medical treatment--until the clinic certifies that she is"healthy." The club woman must carry the registration and VD cards with her at all times. The Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (MoHSA, formerly called the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare) has been supervising the formulation and enforcement of these regulations since the early-mid 1960s, but until the early 1970s, enforcement was highly inconsistent throughout the numerous camptowns. Prior to the 1960s, U.S. medics conducted VD examinations of the women; even in the 1970s, U.S. camps in areas where the Korean authorities were lax about such regulations continued to check the prostitutes. Once in the club, the woman's life revolves around the schedule of the local GIs and the business demands of the club owner or manager, who serves as her pimp. On a typical weekday, she dresses and puts on her make-up in mid-afternoon in preparation for the GIs who "pour out of the [camp] gates at the end of the [work]day." 5 From around 4 or 5 p.m. until midnight to 2 a.m., she sells drinks, flirts and dances with men, and solicits customers for the night club-- she must also pay for medical treatment--until the clinic certifies that she is"healthy." The club woman must carry the registration and VD cards with her at all times. The Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (MoHSA, formerly called the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare) has been supervising the formulation and enforcement of these regulations since the early-mid 1960s, but until the early 1970s, enforcement was highly inconsistent throughout the numerous camptowns. Prior to the 1960s, U.S. medics conducted VD examinations of the women; even in the 1970s, U.S. camps in areas where the Korean authorities were lax about such regulations continued to check the prostitutes. Once in the club, the woman's life revolves around the schedule of the local GIs and the business demands of the club owner or manager, who serves as her pimp. On a typical weekday, she dresses and puts on her make-up in mid-afternoon in preparation for the GIs who"pour out of the [camp] gates at the end of the [work]day." 5 From around 4 or 5 p.m. until midnight to 2 a.m., she sells drinks, flirts and dances with men, and solicits customers for the night. On the weekends, her workday begins earlier and ends later. The club owner/manager requires the woman to sell as many drinks to GIs as possible--alcohol for the men and "ladies' drinks" (usually soft drinks) for herself. Ladies' drinks are particularly high-priced, now about $5 a small glass; the goal is to get the GI to buy many drinks in order to increase the club's revenues. Historically, women have received 10 to 20% of the income from the drinks they sell. 6 Many clubs have drink quotas for the women: if they do not sell at least 150 drinks per month, they do not receive their share of the revenues. In some clubs, if a woman sells more than 600 drinks in a month, she gets a gold ring; if she sells more than 1,000 drinks in a month, she receives a"special bonus." 7 Pushing drinks on the soldiers means the woman also has to keep drinking; on the average, a club woman drinks 20 glasses of soft drinks and/or a mixture of whiskey per night. 8 Moreover, to sell drinks, she must mingle with various GIs in one night, fondling them and being fondled by them in return. On the average, in the mid-1990s, clubs were paying a hostess $250 a month. 9 Selling drinks, however, has never been the mainstay of the women's earnings: Women are expected to sleep with GIs for the bulk of their income because their cut from selling drinks cannot support them, and"[m]any places don't pay any salary." 10 In Uijongbu in the mid-1980s,"long-time" (overnight) was $20, while"short- time" (hourly rate) was $10. 11 Owners and pimps generally take 80% and give the prostitute 20% of her earnings per trick. Most women do not come into the clubs equipped with "hostessing skills" and the willingness to share flesh with GIs. For women who are new to the club scene, an initiation process often takes place. Some women attest to having been raped by their pimp/manager; others have been ordered by the club owner to sleep with a particular soldier; yet others stumble into bed with GIs on their own; some receive advice on the type of man to avoid (e.g., violent types) from more experienced prostitutes. In Let the Good Times Roll, " Ms. Pak" expresses her confusion, curiosity, and fear at beginning work at a GI club in Osan. Although she had sold her body to Korean men before entering the kijich'on, she had a difficult time adjusting to her new situation--she had never seen an American before and worried how she could handle their large bodies. 12 Black men were even more strange to her. At the prospect of her first black patron, she wondered to herself how dark his penis would be and"If I do it with him, will my skin turn black?" 13 Her first sexual encounter with an American took place at the order of her club owner, who "warned that I had to do it." 14 Most of the women have taken to alcohol or drugs to help them get through their sex work. 15 Sometimes women pick up customers; at other times, the GIs express their interest in a particular woman to the club owner/manager, who then tells the woman to sleep with the soldier. The GI and club woman go to her room, which is usually attached to or located near the club. Her room is part of a complex of rooms lined up in a row and separated by very thin walls; other prostitutes live in those rooms. The complex usually belongs to the club owner, who places a watchman or -woman by the entrance to monitor who goes in and out, to receive payments for the sex, and to insure that no woman runs away. In some of the older complexes,"pimp holes" were made in the rooms so that the pimp or monitor could watch over the woman while she sold sex and make sure that she was not scheming with the GI to run away. Moreover, such peeping Tom activities were intended to prevent GIs from avoiding payment--many GIs would claim that the the prostitute never "put out," even if the woman had provided the agreed-upon sexual service. Both the prostitutes and U.S. military officials have observed that club women aggressively seek out customers. In Camp Arirang, Kim Yonja recalls how she and other women grabbed onto men in order to make money. One U.S. Army chaplain commented that"in Korea, the guy is inundated with prostitutes." 16 And an Army captain who had served in Korea during the early 1980s noted that young, inexperienced enlistees were most susceptible to getting duped into serious relationships with prostitutes who sought to"exploit the boys for money." 17 How prostitutes fare physically, financially, and emotionally in the kijich'on environment depends to a great extent on the particular club owner/manager and GI customers she encounters. As"Nanhee" says, some GIs are mean and nasty, especially when they are drunk; others are nice and gentle. 18 At worst, a woman encounters a GI who beats her and murders her, as Yun Kumi did in October 1992. Private Kenneth Markle was convicted of killing her; her landlord found her body--"naked, bloody, and covered with bruises and contusions--with laundry detergent sprinkled over the crime site. In addition, a coke bottle was embedded in Yun's uterus and the trunk of an umbrella driven 27 cm into her rectum." 19 At best, a GI provides money and other necessities, is faithful and caring and ultimately marries her."Oon Kyung," who had married"Jack," was one of the lucky ones. He had"scrape[d] and save[d] to pay to get Oon Kyung out of a club." 20 Afterward,"he work[ed] alongside guys who had slept with her when she was working as a prostitute before they were married." 21 No club woman I spoke with ever referred to club owners and managers as nice, kind, and gentle. Some are not as abusive as those who beat and rape the barwomen, but it is apparent that the owner/manager is responsible for the bulk of the everyday exploitation of the women. Ms. Pak states that"owners usually take advantage of [the women]" by not paying them their share of revenues from drinks and sex. 22 Women who move up in the hierarchy of sex work can become club managers, and they do not necessarily treat the prostitutes with compassion. Kim Yonja, who had worked as a madam in Kunsan, recalled how tough she had been on her hostesses; she had scolded them and pushed them to bring in income for the bar. 23 Thomas Kelly, a former GI and VD officer (he had to help the military track down prostitutes who were alleged to have transmitted the infection), noted how the madams would send out"slicky boys" to"rough up the girls who [didn't] pay [their club debts]." 24 The"debt bondage system" is the most prominent manifestation of exploitation. A woman's debt increases each time she borrows money from the owner--to get medical treatment, to send money to her family, to cover an emergency, to bribe police officers and VD clinic workers. Most women also begin their work at a new club with large amounts of debt, which usually results from the"agency fee" and advance pay. Typically, (illegal) job placement agencies which specialize in bar and brothel prostitution place women in a club and charge the club owner a fee. The owner transfers the fee onto the new employee's"account" at usurious rates; Ms. Pak mentions one club owner charging 10%. 25 Often, women ask the owner for an advance in order to pay off her existing debts to another club, and the cycle of debt continues. Owners also set up a new employee with furniture, stereo equipment, clothing, and cosmetics--items deemed necessary for attracting GI customers. These costs get added to the woman's account with interest. In 1988, the left- leaning Mal Magazine (Malchi), reported that on the average, prostitutes' club debts range between one and four million won 26 ($1,462 and $5,847 respectively in 1988 terms). For this reason, women try to pick up as many GIs as possible night after night, and for this reason, women cannot leave prostitution at will. Nanhee sums up the debt-ridden plight: In some American [camptown] clubs, if you have no debt, they see to it that you incur some. If you had no debt, you would have the choice of going to another club, a better club. But if the woman has debts, she can't leave before she pays up. Escaping from a club isn't easy to do. The women with a conscience stay and work [to pay off the debt]. 27 The great majority of women who enter kijich'on prostitution have already experienced severe deprivation and abuse--poverty, rape, repeated beatings by lovers or husbands. The camp followers of the war era lived off their bodies and fed their family members with their earnings. Korean camptown officials who had lived through the war expressed sympathy for the early generations of prostitutes when I interviewed them in 1992.
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Women suffer constant and concealed abuse, denying them agency
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
To expect club owners and managers, who served as collective pimps for the hostesses working in their establishments, to educate these women was a naive assumption on the part of the U.S. military authorities. It was common knowledge among camptown residents, both American and Korean, that club owners' only concern for the women was their ability to increase club revenues. The U.S. side was fully aware that many club owners/managers mistreated the women by physically beating them, psychologically harassing them, and keeping them in debt bondage. Demanding that these owners/managers increase control over these women's conduct was tantamount to increasing and legitimating the former's exploitation and abuse of the latter. The former U.S. chair of the Subcommittee from December 1971 to October 1972 responded frankly to my question, "What kind of carrots and sticks were used to enforce nondiscrimination by club women?" Answer: "Generally, a visit to the bar owner would either get her fired or get her head screwed on straight. Give pressure to the bar owner and they usually carried through." 32 Besides the power of hiring and firing, the club owner had other means of cutting off a prostitute's livelihood, e.g., confiscating her VD/registration card so that she would not be able to work. Kim Yonja stated that because most club women avoided the monthly "Etiquette and Good Conduct" lecture, some club owners/managers helped out the local Korean authorities who sponsored the meeting by confiscating the club women's VD cards as a way to force the women to attend: "If there were going to be a meeting tomorrow, then the owner would take away the VD card the night before, at closing time, and prohibit the women who don't go to the meeting from coming to work at the club for several days. Without the VD card, women could not work." 33 Another woman emphasized that there was virtually no legal or political recourse that women could take against the abuses: "If a woman is abused by the owner, unless the woman gets bruises that take months to heal, then, things just get covered up." 34 The women's limited power over their own lives was sharply reduced because of the political power the owners held over camptown life. According to Kim Yonja, who was active in the camptown politics of Kunsan and Songt'an in the 1970s and 1980s, Most club owners in camptowns are village leaders. They hold power. It's not that the original residents become the owners, but owners have arrived from other areas. By establishing their business and earning money, they become owners, Special Tourist Association leaders, etc. So, if a woman is physically abused by the owner, or if a woman is murdered by a GI, she had nowhere to turn to: She would be told (by the Korean authorities), "Look, the American soldier is here to help Korea-- they put their lives on the line for Korea." 35
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Prioritizing the military over women’s agency and quality of life, permeates all levels of US foreign policy
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
In the late 1930s Virginia Woolf challenged the notion that states function to protect, preserve, and promote the interests of the people. Ahead of her time, she began the process of deconstructing the concepts, "national interest" and "national security." For her, "national interests" represented the interests of men, particularly the privileged, and "national security" did not eliminate the physical, economic, legal, and social insecurity of women. More than fifty years later, women and men echo Woolf's bold assertions. Contemporary feminist academics and activists, ranging from liberal critics of Realism to postmodernists, women and development advocates, and peace activists, all challenge the role and capacity of the sovereign state to know and best fulfill the needs and interests of a nation's people. With respect to women and security, Spike Peterson and Judith Stiehm go so far as to describe the modern state as a patriarchal protection racket, 6 and many Asian feminists living with U.S. military bases and camptown prostitution in their countries consider their states collective pimps. Feminists charge that states have made women's lives insecure by fixating on military buildup, stand-offs, and adventurism. They have noted that women, if given the chance, would define security less narrowly to include "safe working conditions and freedom from the threat of war or unemployment or the economic squeeze of foreign debt." 7 Mary Burguieres advocates feminist approaches to peace which would espouse Johann Galtung's conceptualization of peace as "an absence of both personal and structural violence." 8 She adds that such approaches are important because they "loosen" governmental policies for peace from their "exclusive association with defence and foreign policy" and link peace efforts with social policy in general. 9 My interviews with Korean former prostitutes support the basic feminist claim that states' definition of "national security" is often irrelevant to the security of women's lives, and that state pursuits on behalf of national security often exploit and oppress women. The kijich'on women ridiculed the Korean government's efforts in the Clean-Up Campaign to label them as "personal ambassadors" and their selling of sex as patriotic service. Most women admitted that they were unsure of the meaning of "national security" (kukka anbo) and that governmental actions generally were oblivious to their needs for physical and economic well- being. Kim Yonja, a 25-year veteran of camptown prostitution, sharply articulated that the Korean and U.S. governments' rationales for or public professions of security policies had no connection to the actual needs of camptown women for protection. All of the women I interviewed stated that their greatest need for ROK government protection (after the Korean War) was not from North Korean threats but the exploitation and abuse of club owners/pimps, local Korean police and VD clinic officials, and the power of the U.S. bases. In other words, they needed protection from a Korean law enforcement system that inadequately provided for their legal, economic, political, and human rights and a Korean government too cowardly and self-interested to protect them against violence and abuse by U.S. soldiers. Rather than feeling protected by the Korean government and U.S. soldiers, all of the women stated they felt used and betrayed by both Korean and U.S. authorities. The first of the two most common complaints against the U.S. military was that the Americans, who were in Korea to help Koreans, considered the women mere sex toys, concerned only with the health and well-being of the GI. The second was the violence of the U.S. soldiers toward the women and the lack of legal accountability on the part of the military authorities for the soldiers' criminal behavior. Mrs. Ch'oe recalled that she had been beaten by a U.S. serviceman and had reported the incident to the Korean police and the U.S. military police but that the soldier was allowed to go free. In Mrs. Pak's case, she experienced the irresponsibility and injustice of the U.S. military authorities in the extreme. Her sister, also a camptown prostitute in Osan, was mutilated and murdered allegedly by a U.S. serviceman in the early 1970s, but U.S. authorities never turned the man over to the ROK authorities (as provisioned in the Status of Forces Agreement) to be tried in the ROK legal system. Mrs. Pak bitterly recounted that the U.S. military offered neither apology nor financial compensation to her family and that camptown residents had to collect money from one another to pay for the funeral expenses. According to Mrs. Pak: "U.S. law in the U.S. was good--but in Korea, it was never upheld. The U.S. lawyers simply protected U.S. soldiers but did not seek the truth and real justice. The U.S. government did not give any compensation to Koreans for the wrongs that U.S. soldiers committed." All the women emphatically repeated that the ROK government did nothing to improve their welfare. They particularly complained against the impotence and/or unwillingness of the Korean police to prevent abuses against the women and to help them leave prostitution. Mrs. Chang stated that when she had tried to run away from her club owner and had gone to the local police for help, the police kept her in the station overnight, then called her owner to come get her. The owner showed up at the station and "dragged her back to the club." 11
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This patriarchal framework drives and sustains wars
Karen J. Warren, Philosophy Professor, Macalester, and Duane L. Cady, Philosophy Professor, Hamline U., Spring 94, Hypatia 9:2
Conceptually, a feminist perspective suggests that patriarchal conceptual frameworks and the behavior they give rise to, are what sanction, maintain, and perpetuate "isms of domination"-sexism, racism, classism, warism,4 naturism5 and the coercive power-over institutions and practices necessary to maintain these "isms." If this is correct, then no account of peace is adequate which does not reveal patriarchal conceptual frameworks; they underlie and sustain war and conflict resolution strategies. (Examples of why we think this is correct are laced throughout the remainder of the paper.) One glaring example of how the dominant cultural outlook manifests this oppressive conceptual framework is seen in macho, polarized, dichotomized attitudes toward war and peace. Pacifists are dismissed as naive, soft wimps; warriors are realistic, hard heroes. War and peace are seen as opposites. In fact few individual warists or pacifists live up to these exaggerated extremes. This suggests a reconceptualization of values along a continuum which allows degrees of pacifism and degrees of justification for war (Cady 1989).
1ac And you must prioritize our impacts. They can’t access our depth of the effects of militarism against women. The negative distracts from the widespread state-sponsored violence. Cuomo, Chris J. Associate Professor of Philosophy and member of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Cincinnati. War is not just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence. 5-27-1996 In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances. Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analysis. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state
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And set the bar high for their DAs. Their impacts overlook the value of human life in their neutralizing conception of the world.
Jack Donnelly, College of the Holy Cross, The Concept of Human Rights, 1985, p. 55-58
Basic moral and political rights are not just weighting factors in utilitarian calculations that deal with an undifferentiated 'happiness'. Rather, they are demands and constraints of a different order, grounded in an essentially substantive judgement of the conditions necessary for human development and flourishing. They also provide means - rights - for realising human potentials. The neutrality of utilitarianism, its efforts to assure that everyone counts 'equally', results in no-one counting as a person; as Robert E. Goodin puts it, people drop out of utilitarian calculations, which are instead about disembodied In Aristotelian terms, utilitarianism errs in basing its judgements on 'numerical' rather than 'proportional' equality. For our purposes, such differences should be highlighted. Therefore, let us consider utilitarianism, whether act or rule, as an alternative to rights in general, and thus human rights as well. In particular, we can consider utility and human rights as competing strategies for limiting the range of legitimate state action. Once again, Bentham provides a useful focus for our discussion. While Bentham insists on the importance of limiting the range of legitimate state action (1838:11, 495, VIII, .557 ff.), he also insists that (natural) rights do not set those limits. In fact, he argues that construed as limits on the state, natural rights 'must ever be, - the rights of anarchy', justifying insurrection whenever a single right is violated (1838:11, 522, 496, 501, 506). For Bentham, natural rights are absolute rights, and thus inappropriate to the real world of political action. In fact, though, no major human rights theorist argues that they are absolute. For example, Locke holds that the right to revolution is reserved by society, not the individual (1967: para. 243). Therefore, individual violations of human rights per se do not justify revolution. Furthermore, Locke supports revolution only in cases of gross, persistent and systematic violations of natural rights (1967: paras 204, 207, 225), as does Paine. The very idea of absolute rights is absurd from a human rights perspective, since logically there can be at most one absolute right, unless we (unreasonably) assume that rights never come into conflict. A more modest claim would be that human rights are 'absolute' in the sense that they override all principles and practices except other human rights. Even this doctrine, however, is rejected by most if not all major human rights theorists and documents. For example, Article I of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, after declaring that 'men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights', adds that 'civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility', thus recognising restrictions on the continued complete equality of rights. Similarly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 29) permits such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and free- doms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes a similar general limiting proviso (Article 4) as well as particular limitations on most of the enumerated rights. Rights ordinarily 'trump' other considerations, but the mere presence of a right - even a basic human right - does not absolutely and automatically determine the proper course of action, all things considered. In certain exceptional circumstances, needs, utility, interests or righteousness may override rights. The duties correlative to rights, and even the trumping force of rights, are prima facie only. But other principles also have prima facie moral force. Sometimes this will be sufficient to overcome even the special entrenched priority of rights. The obligations arising from such rights therefore ought not to be discharged, all things considered. In such cases, we can speak of the right being 'infringed', since the (prima facie) obligation correlative to the right is not discharged, but it would be seriously misleading to say that it had been 'violated' (Thomson 1976, 1977). But if even basic human rights can be justifiably infringed, aren't rights ultimately subservient to utility? If recalcitrant political realities sometimes require subordinating natural rights, aren't we simply suggesting that human rights are merely utopian aspirations inappropriate to a world in which dirty hands are often a requirement of political action - and thus where utility is the only reasonable guide? Such a response misconstrues the relationship between rights and utility and the ways in which rights are overridden. Consider a very simple case, involving minor rights that on their face would seem to be easily overridden. If A promises to drive B and C to the movies but later changes his mind, in deciding whether to keep his promise (and discharge his rights-based obligations). A must consider more than the relative utilities of both courses of action for all the parties affected; in most cases, he ought to drive them to the movies even if that would reduce overall utility. At the very least he must ask them to excuse him from his obligation, this requirement (as well as the power to excuse) being a reflection of the right-holder's control over the rights relationship. Utility alone usually will not override even minor rights; we require more than a simple calculation of utility to justify infringing rights. The special priority of rights/titles, as we have seen, implies that the quality, not just the quantity, of the countervailing forces (utilities) must be taken into consideration. For example, if, when the promised time comes, A wants instead to go get drunk with some other friends, simply not showing up to drive B and C to the movies will not be justifiable even if that would maximise utility; the desire for a drunken binge is not a consideration that ordinarily will justifiably override rights. But if A accompanies an accident victim to the hospital, even if A is only one of several passers-by who stopped to offer help, and his action proves to be of no real benefit to the victim, usually this will be a sufficient excuse, even if utility would be maximised by A going to the movies. Therefore, even recasting rights as weighted interests (which would seem to be the obvious utilitarian 'fix' to capture the special priority of rights) still misses the point, because it remains essentially quantitative. Rights even tend to override an accumulation of comparable or parallel interests. Suppose that sacrificing a single innocent person with a rare blood factor could completely and permanently cure ten equally innocent victims of a disease that produces a sure, slow and agonising death. Each of the eleven has the 'same' right to life. Circumstances require, however, that a decision be made as to who will live and who will die. The natural rights theorist would almost certainly choose to protect the rights of the one individual - and such a conclusion, when faced with the scapegoat problem, is one of the greatest virtues of a natural rights doctrine to its advocates. This conclusion rests on a qualitative judgement that establishes the right, combined with the further judgement that it is not society's role to infringe such rights simply to foster utility, a judgement arising from the special moral priority of rights. Politically, such considerations are clearest in the case of extremely unpopular minorities. For example, plausible arguments can be made that considerations of utility would justify persecution of selected religious minorities(e.g. Jews for centuries in the West, Mormons in nineteenth-century America, Jehovah's Witnesses in contemporary Malawi), even giving special weight to the interests of members of these minorities and considering the precedents set by such persecutions. None the less, human rights demand that an essentially qualitative judgement be made that such persecutions are incompatible with a truly human life and cannot be allowed - and such judgements go a long way to explaining the relative appeal of human rights theories. But suppose that the sacrifice of one innocent person would save not ten but a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million people. All things considered, trading one innocent life for a million, even if the victim resists most forcefully, would seem to be not merely justifiable but demanded. Exactly how do we balance rights (in the sense of 'having a right'), wrongs (in the sense of 'what is right') and interests? Do the numbers count? If so, why, and in what way? If not, why not? Ultimately the defender of human rights is forced back to human nature, the source of natural or human rights. For a natural rights theorist there are certain attributes, potentialities and holdings that are essential to the maintenance of a life worthy of a human being. These are given the special protection of natural rights; any 'utility' that might be served by their infringement or violation would be indefensible, literally inhuman - except in genuinely extraordinary circumstances, the possibility of which cannot be denied, but the probability of which should not be overestimated. Extraordinary circumstances do force us to admit that, at some point, however rare, the force of utilitarian considerations builds up until quantity is transformed into quality. The human rights theorist, however, insists on the extreme rarity of such cases. Furthermore, exotic cases should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental difference in emphasis (and in the resulting judgements in virtually all cases) between utility and (human) rights. Nor should they be allowed to obscure the fact that on balance the flaws in rights-based theories and practices seem less severe, and without a doubt less numerous, than those of utility-based political strategies.
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Treat negative arguments with skepticism – the data behind their arguments are politically biased to prop up the current system of subordinating women’s concerns Tickner 6, Feminist Methodologies or International Relations, J. Ann Ticker: Professor, School of IR at USC, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press p. 37
These two cases, as with most feminist IR research, have avoided quantitative methods. As my case studies have demonstrated, fitting women and other marginalized people into methodologically conventional quantitative frameworks has been problematic. Many of the experiences of women’s lives have not yet been documented or analyzed, either within social science disciplines or by states. The choices that states make about ‘which data to collect is a political act. Traditional ways in which data are collected and analyzed do not lend themselves to answering many of the questions that feminists raise. The data that are available to scholars and, more importantly, the data that are not, determine which research questions get asked and how they are answered. Marilyn Waring describes how national accounting systems have been shaped and reshaped to help states frame their national security policies — specifically to understand how to pay for wars.22 In national accounting systems no value is attached to the environment, to unpaid work, to the reproduction of human life, or to its maintenance or care, tasks generally undertaken by women (Waring 1988: 3—4). Political decisions are made on the basis of data that policy elites choose to collect (Waring 1988: 302). Waring goes on to assert that, under the guise of value-free science, the economics of accounting has constructed a reality which believes that “value” results only when (predominantly) men interact with the marketplace (Waring 1988: 17— 18).
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Solvency:
The securitizing forced prostitution is uniquely damaging and must be resisted in all instances.
Sealing Cheng is a Sealing Cheng is the Henry Luce Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Department. She joined Wellesley in spring 2005. Her courses include: Introduction to Women’s Studies; Global Feminism; Love and Intimacy; and Asian Women on the Move. 2010, “On the move for love : migrant entertainers and the U.S. military in South Korea” (Pensylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Gijédmn-U.S. military camptown in South Korea-are not “really” what Korea is about. For example. My twenty-year-old Seoul National University friend told me that I as a foreigner, should not be going there because he felt ashamed of them; my sixty-year old landlord just frowned and turned her face away the few times I talked about my trips to Dongducheon; and a senior Korean anthropologist asked me to studydusa (ancestor worship) and shamanism instead if I “really wanted to learn about Ko-rean culture.” These reactions illuminated for me howgijichon symbolizes the antith- esis of what the ideal Korean nation should be. From the perspective of Koreans who shared in so many ways. The national discourse of economic suceess and globalization in the late 1990s, foreigners who want to learn about Korea should do so either through its heritage (shemanism, ancestral rites), through its economic achievement in becoming one of the Aslan miracles of the 1980s, or both. Politically. U.S. military presence in violates the ideal of national sovereignty. Culturally and socially, gijchon challenges the homogenous ideal of the nation that state and popular discourses promote. Katherine Moon has describe gijchon as “neither America nor Korea”-“hybrid towns, poaaesaing elements of America and Korea in the border of the residents. English and Korean language store signs. U.S. military slogans and logos juxtaposed with dolls garbed in traditional Korean dress."' In other words, their hybridity is in- consistent with the imagined nation. Koreans-not just giiichon women working as hostesses in the clubs, but everyone whose livelihood depends on the presence and needs of the U.S. military-therefore become internal. Geographically a part of South Korea, gijidron is politically. culturally, and socially a borderland, and gijchon Koreans are best kept on the margins of the nation. From the perspective of the anthropologist, this common tendency in mainstream Korean society to demarcate gijidson as "un-Korean” and (therefore) a site of danger makes griichon an illuminating site For the study of the constructions of Korean nationhood and oontagion. Mary Douglas suggests in Purity and Danger that "ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions have as their main function to im- pose system on an inherently untidy scenario, certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagion. Gijchon speaks neither to the pride nor the sucess of South Korea as a modern nation-state. In fact. it interferes with the dominant fantasy of a globalized. modem South Korea. What gijidson represents, therefore, is what needs to be purged from the Korean nation. Foreign presence is a constant source of “internal cultural debates"’ about the nation. ln 2008 the world was surprised by the nicely candlelit vigils of millions in Seoul protesting the suspension of the ban against U.S. beef imports on the grounds of health concerns about madcow disease. U.S. and Korean, including Secretary of State Condoleeua Rice, repeated that the beef was safe but were oblivious to the het that the protestors’ concerns went way beyond the beeé in 2008 “mad cow" symbolized South Korean discontent about both domestic politics and relations with the United States. Apart from accusations that the South Korean govemment outlawed to U.S. demands so lift the ban in return for a Free Trade Agreement, the neollberal principles of privatization and redevelopment championed by President Lee Myung-balt promised eco- nomic and physical displacement for many, at a time when me South Ko- rean economy was reaching stagllation.
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In particular, US military officials prop up the current framework of masculinity. Only a movement against Korean prostitution would open up the possibility to reevaluate US foreign policy at a global level.
Gwyn Kirk is a founder member of Women for Genuine Security and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. 3-14-08, “Gender and U.S. Bases in Asia-Pacific,” (http://www.fpif.org/articles/gender_and_us_bases_in_asia-pacific, Foreign Policy in Focus) For the U.S. military, land and bodies are so much raw material to use and discard without responsibility or serious consequences to those in power. Regardless of gender, soldiers are trained to dehumanize others so that, if ordered, they can kill them. Sexual abuse and torture committed by U.S. military personnel and contractorsagainst Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison illustrate a grim new twist on militarized violence, where race and nation “trumped” gender. White U.S. womenwere among the perpetrators, thereby appropriating the masculinized role. The violated Iraqi men, meanwhile, were forced into the feminized role. Gendered inequalities, which are fundamental to U.S. military operations in the Asia-Pacific region, affect men as well as women. Young men who live near U.S. bases see masculinity defined in military terms. They may work as cooks or bartenders who provide rest and relaxation to visiting servicemen. They may be forced to migrate for work to larger cities or overseas, seeking to fulfill their dreams of giving their families a better future. U.S. peace movements should not only address U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world. Communities in the Asia-Pacific region have a long history of contesting U.S. militarism and offer eloquent testimonies to the negative impact of U.S. military operations there. These stories provide insights into the gendered dynamics of U.S. foreign and military policy, and the complicity of allied nations in this effort.
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We must contesting patriarchy in the debate space is critical to solve for status quo. A vote affirmative can bring about similar revolutions.
Jarvis 2000 D. S. L. Jarvis, 2000. [University of South Carolina Press, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline, p 155]. For feminists the most immediate remedy to masculinist androcentrism in International Relations and global politics is, then, an empirical one: add more women and stir. Reconstituting International Relations in fundamentally new ways involves bringing more women into the academy and into positions of power in international politics. By adding more female researchers, for example, feminists argue the proclivity to "malestream" theory can be checked by breaking down the boys' dub syndrome .71 Gender equity that and affirmative action policies as a means to engineer socially an end to overt discrimination have thus been the first order of business. From here, feminist women, "less bounded by any narrow disciplinary 156 International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism lens," can then "examine insights from diverse locations, situate them in larger transdisciplinarv contexts, and weave new understandings out of these multiple threads" by virtue of the "episternic advantage" they enjoy over men knowers.74 This, of course, is not just about more female representation as so-called empirical feminists would argue, but, from the perspective of standpoint feminists, about the ontological primacy of "women as knowers" combined with an attempt "to eliminate the fascism in our heads... build upon the open qualities of human discourse, and thereby intervene in the way knowledge is produced and constituted at the particular sites where a localized power-discourse prevails."' Equality in representation is only the first of many revolutions, a necessary-but-hardly sufficient condition to meet the challenges of thinking differently about how we think and know, and a recognition of how "gender both creates and reproduces a world of multiple inequalities that today threatens all of us."' Thus, "the task of ungendering power," notes Peterson, "is twofold-adding women to the existing world politics power structures and transforming those very power structures, ideologically and materially." This project has been common enough in International Relations, evidenced by increasing calls for more women researchers, more feminist analyses of international politics, and increased efforts to bring gendered perspectives and issues to bear upon the study of global events and processes. Yet, if these attempts appear diverse, all tend to be analogous, united by the common penchant to "reclaim the private." "The personal is political," writes Enloe, echoing the words of Susan Moller Okin.7' "Feminist tracings of early state formation," for example, have sought to highlight the "emergence and consolidation of public political power and the centralisation of authority" which concomitantly "constituted a sepa- rate domestic or private sphere that came to be associated with women and the feminine."" This false public/private dichotomy feminists see as an artificial dualism intended to sideline women into domestic servitude while depoliticizing the domestic sphere. That the "personal is political," suggests Enloe, means "that politics is not shaped merely by what happens in legislative debates, voting booths or war rooms." Rather, men, "who dominate public life, have told women to stay in the kitchen,. . . [and] have used their public power to construct private relationships in ways that [bolster] their masculinized political control."' Historically, men have thus appropriated public/political power, thereby denying women a legit- imate political voice and making them dependent. New feminist under- standings and research thus attempt to show how a reclamation of the private as political redefines the questions of International Relations and yr. Feminist Revisions of International Relations 157 the research agenda's scholars should otherwise be engaged with. "Accept- ing that the political is personal prompts one to investigate the politics of marriage, venereal disease and homosexuality," claims Enloc, "not as mar- ginal issues, but as matters central to the state. Doing this type of research becomes just as serious as studying military weaponry or taxation policy." The cult of masculinity, as V. Spike Peterson terms it, extends down into the depths of what otherwise appears as natural or given. The "cult of motherhood" and the notion of "women's work," for example, represent patriarchal norms culturally ingrained in the modem nation-state that jus- tifies "structural violence-inadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sex segregated wages, rights, and resources" for women .12 Indeed, for Peterson, the state is complicit in structural violence, albeit indirectly, "through its promotion of masculinist, heterosexist, and classist ideolo- gies-expressed, for example, in public education models, media images, the militarism of culture, welfare policies, and patriarchal law." Through "its selective sanctioning of nonstate violence, particularly in its policy of nonintervention in domestic violence," and through direct male brutality like "murder, rape, battering, [and] incest," Peterson claims that male domination is constantly reproduced, reaffirming the subjugation of wo-men as "the objects of masculinist social control." Reclaiming these "private spaces," events, and acts as public-political spaces demystifies the patriarchal base of the state and how it constructs and manipulates "the ideology describing public and private life." More importantly, this strategy opens up International Relations to a multiplicity of subjects, issues, and research agendas with all of them attempting to disrupt the boundaries imposed by the "radical bifurcation of asymmetrical public and private spheres"; so begins the project of "ungendering world politics.""
Contention One: Inherency
US military presence in South Korea has produced a system of state-sponsored prostitution
Katharine H.S. Moon, Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies @ Wellesley College, 1997, “Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations”, 1997, Columbia University Press, Page 1-2
The selling and buying of sex by Koreans and Americans have been a staple of U.S.-Korean relations since the Korean War (1950-1953) and the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in Korea since 1955. It would not be far-fetched to say that more American men have become familiar with camptown prostitution in Korea since the 1950s than with military strategy and Korea’s GNP figures. Since the war, over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military. And millions of Koreans and Americans have shared a sense of special bonding, for they have together shed blood in battle and mixed blood through sex and Amerasian offspring. U.S. military-oriented prostitution in Korea is not simply a matter of women walking the streets and picking up U.S. soldiers for a few bucks. It is a system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the U.S. military). The U.S. military and the Korean government have referred to such women as "bar girls," "hostesses," "special entertainers," "businesswomen," and "comfort women." Koreans have also called these women the highly derogatory names, yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess). As this study reveals, both governments have viewed such prostitution as a means to advance the "friendly relations" of both countries and to keep U.S. soldiers, "who fight so hard for the freedom of the South Korean people," happy. The lives of Korean women working as prostitutes in military camptowns have been inseparably tied to the activities and welfare of the U.S. military installations since the early 1950s. To varying degrees, USFK (U.S. Forces, Korea) and ROK authorities have controlled where, when, and how these "special entertainers" work and live. The first half of the 1970s witnessed the consolidation of such joint U.S.-ROK control.
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The South Korean government facilitates this prostitution to encourage the US military to stay
Choe Sang-Hun is a staff writer for the New York Times. 1-7-09, “Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?_r=2&emc=eta1, The New York Times)
South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army. Bae at 29. Now 80, she lives on welfare and uses an oxygen machine. Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops. While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea’s own history. “Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview. Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that. But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency. “They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said. The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases. In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners. The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well. The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies. “If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.” The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which handles women’s issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes’ accusations. So did the American military command in Seoul, which responded with a general statement saying that the military “does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution.” The New York Times interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents. The documents do provide some support for many of the women’s claims, though most are snapshots in time. The women maintain that the practices occurred over decades. In some sense, the women’s allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea. Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world. Bae, 80, a former prostitute at an American base, covers her face in her room in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns. The women received some support for their claims in 2006, from a former government official. In a television interview, the official, Kim Kee-joe, who was identified as having been a high-level liaison to the United States military, said, “Although we did not actively urge them to engage in prostitution, we, especially those from the county offices, did often tell them that it was not something bad for the country either.” Transcripts of parliamentary hearings also suggest that at least some South Korean leaders viewed prostitution as something of a necessity. In one exchange in 1960, two lawmakers urged the government to train a supply of prostitutes to meet what one called the “natural needs” of allied soldiers and prevent them from spending their dollars in Japan instead of South Korea. The deputy home minister at the time, Lee Sung-woo, replied that the government had made some improvements in the “supply of prostitutes” and the “recreational system” for American troops. Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Moon back the women’s assertions that the control of venereal disease was a driving factor for the two governments. They say the governments’ coordination became especially pronounced as Korean fears about an American pullout increased after President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of American troops in South Korea. “The idea was to create an environment where the guests were treated well in the camp towns to discourage them from leaving,” Mr. Kim said in the television interview. Ms. Moon, a Wellesley College professor, said that the minutes of meetings between American military officials and Korean bureaucrats in the 1970s showed the lengths the two countries went to prevent epidemics.
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While prostitution is currently illegal in South Korea, it thrives because of U.S. military presence. Without a withdrawal of troops, neither government would put an end to the Camptowns.
Dujisin 9, Zoltan, July 7 2009, “Prostitution Thrives with US Military Presence”, Inter Press Service News Agency, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47556
Since 1945, U.S. troops have been stationed in the Korean peninsula, with their current strength estimated to be 28,500. The country plunged into civil war between 1950 and 1953 and since then, U.S. troops have remained there, claiming to act as a deterrent against North Korea, the country’s communist neighbour. Prostitution in the region is a direct result of their presence, local observers say. Russian and Chinese troops also had troops stationed on the Korean peninsula in the aftermath of the civil conflict, but "have since left the area while U.S. troops are still here, in almost 100 military bases," Yu Young Nim, the head of a local non-governmental organisation which provides counseling, medical and legal care for sex workers, told IPS. Yu Young Nim’s office is located at the Camp Stanley Camptown, a few metres away from local Korean restaurants, home in the 1980s to U.S.-imported Kentucky Fried Chicken and Subway logos. Locals attest to the slow decay of a town. In front of one of these restaurants, sits a 36-year old former "mama-san", which in Korea denotes women supervising sex-work establishments. Like many other retired sex-workers, she looks older than her age, and has decided to open a restaurant. The "mama-san" prefers catering to U.S. soldiers instead of the more demanding Korean clientele. "G.I.s eat their food without complaints," she told IPS. "Koreans always expect to be served like kings." It was in camps such as these that a new dish called Pudaettsigae entered the Korean diet: Poor Koreans took ingredients such as sausage, beans, processed cheese from leftovers at the U.S. camp and mixed them with home-grown ingredients. After being a sex worker for much of her youth, during which she had a son with a U.S. soldier, like other "mama-sans" she opened her own club, where she employed other girls. She had to shut shop three years ago due to declining incomes. "If the base closes, I’ll try moving to the [United] States; it would be good for my son," she says. Her son lives in Korea and speaks the language well enough, but got his primary education in English. "I don’t think he could attend a Korean university, but the U.S. universities are too expensive for us." She could only wish his father was there to help. "I have some contact with the grandfather, but barely with the father. He doesn’t send my son gifts, not even a Christmas card. He has so much more money than me and doesn’t do anything for his son," she says. "My son [believes] he has no father." Several U.S. soldiers have married local prostitutes, in many cases impregnating them, only to later abandon them. "Even in those cases of couples living together, these women can be easily abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, and are victims of physical, mental and financial abuse," says Young Nim. "The women mostly come from broken families, backgrounds of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and there is no protection from victims of these crimes," he says. "After entering the prostitution business they can’t get out." U.S. officials have made statements condemning prostitution but have done little to stop it. "They think this system should exist for the U.S. soldiers. Superficially they stand for a zero tolerance policy but practically they know what is going on and use this system," Young Nim told IPS. There has been a reduction in prostitution of Korean women, which "has more to do with the work of non-governmental organisations and the fact that Korea has developed economically," while "there is no contact with the U.S. authorities. They have a legal office and counseling centre but only for their own soldiers and relatives." After the negative publicity, the top military officials of the U.S. army have slowly became more outspoken in their condemnation of prostitution. U.S. soldiers were discouraged from frequenting traditional entertainment districts in central Seoul, although locals say that did little to stop them. A turning point was the violent murder of a prostitute in Dongducheon in 1992. The finger of suspicion pointed at U.S. troops, though action against them is difficult given they enjoy a special legal status since 1945. While prostitution is illegal in South Korea, camp towns are practically exempted from crackdowns, and US military anti-prostitution policies have forced these places to minimize their visibility.
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The problem is endemic—forced prostitution will remain as long as the US military does
Kirk and Okazawa-rey 1998-(writers for The Women and War Reader, “Making Connections Building an East Asia-U.S. Women’s Network against U.S. Militarism” New York University Press. http://www.gwynkirk.net/pdf/making_connections_paper.pdf
Participants shared the view that violence against women is an integral part of U.S. military attitudes, training, and culture. It is not random, but systemic, and cannot simply be attributed to “a few bad apples’ as the military authorities often try to do. We noted the many reports of rape, assault, and sexual harassment within the U.S. military that have come to light over the past few years. We also noted that U.S. military families experience higher rates of domestic violence compared to nonmilitary families. But the main emphasis of our discussion concerned crimes of violence committed by U.S. military personnel against civilians in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, especially violence against women, and the institutionalization of military prostitution. Crimes of Violence Women from all countries represented, including the United States, reported crimes of violence committed by U.S. military personnel against local women. Okinawan women emphasized violent attacks of women and girls by U.S. military personnel, especially the marines who are in Okinawa in large numbers. In May 1995, for example, a 24-year old Okinawan woman was beaten to death by a G.I. with a hammer in the doorway of her house. On their return from Beijing Conference in September1995, Okinawan women immediately organized around the rape of a twelve-year old girl, which had occurred while they were away. This revitalized opposition to the U.S. military presence in Okinawa and drew worldwide attention to violence against women on the part of U.S. military personnel. The National Coalition for the Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea, which comprises human rights activists, religious groups, feminists, and labor activists, was galvanized into action by a particularly brutal rape and murder of a bar woman, Yoon Kum E, in 1992. Korean participants commented that pimps and G.I.s try to intimidate the women against speaking out; women are also afraid of public humiliation. Drawing public attention to such crimes is embarrassing to the U.S. military. They are usually denied and covered up.
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Contention Two is Gender
Trafficking and forced prostitution denigrate women—treating women as commodities
Enriquez 99, Jean, Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking In Women-Asia Pacific, “Filipinas in Prostitution around U.S. Military Bases in Korea: A Recurring Nightmare”, Seoul, South Korea, November 1999
CATW asserts that trafficking in women is inseparable with the issue of prostitution. The gender-based nature of trafficking exposes itself as serving the purpose of ensuring the steady supply of women to areas where men demand sexual services. We deplore trafficking and prostitution as violations of women’s human rights. We cannot consider it work, because among others, it compels women to perform acts that denigrates their person — their integrity as human beings. The impact to women of sexual exploitation is hardly healed by time. Amerasian children, estimated at 30,000, were born to Filipinas prostituted around the U.S. military bases in the Philippines. They receive no assistance from either the U.S. or Philippine government. Economically, ‘working in the clubs’ meant irregular earnings and slavery, as many of them would be withheld of their salaries or are fined for any ‘misconduct’. The women were abused physically, psychologically and emotionally. Some were murdered. With the Visiting Forces Agreement recently signed between the Philippine and U.S. governments, 22 ports will be opened to foreign troops and more women will be abused in the remote rural areas of the country. In Korea, our women are once again subjected to the same brutality. The same experiences continue to haunt our women. In Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere, the women are viewed as commodities to be bought, and being Asians, they are certainly perceived as less than human. Trafficking and prostitution have reached crisis proportions in the Asian region, with the entry and maintenance of foreign military troops, and worsening globalization of economies. The R & R policy of U.S. military and its surrounding industry rely heavily on the buying and luring of women not only in Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines, but more women from other countries including Russia, China and Thailand. Its twin menace, the unrestricted and globalized trade, rides on the continuing export of labor, as a convenient channel to traffic women for slave-like work or prostitution. Every month, 200-400 women and girls from Bangladesh are trafficked to Pakistan in the guise of labor migration. Yearly, 5,000 Nepalese women and girls are brought to India and Hong Kong on the same pretext. Currently, studies estimate that 150,00 Filipinas are exploited in the entertainment industry of Japan. More and more women from E. Europe are transported to the West and to Asia for prostitution. It might surprise many that Africa is also becoming a destination for trafficking. In 1992, 8 Filipinas were tricked that they will work as waitresses in Germany but were instead brought to clubs in Nigeria. Trafficking and prostitution, thus, need to be understood as problems arising from contexts not only of poverty and unemployment, but also maintained and promoted by economic interests and political policies that thrive on the subordinated status of women in our societies. As significantly, there are long-held definitions of masculinity, reinforced by the military institution, that are satiated by trafficking in women.
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Women in Camptowns are given quotas on their sexual performances and are trapped in a cycle of debts that prevents them from leaving, denying them the possibilities that are implicit in human agency.
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
There are two types of kijich'on prostitutes, the registered and the unregistered, or so-called streetwalkers. This book is about the first group of women, who are the governmentally recognized"special entertainers." Registered women sell drinks, dance with GIs, and pick up their customers in the kijich'on clubs. These women have more job security than streetwalkers because they have official sanction to sell their flesh. Moreover, they have a regular establishment from which they can attract customers, and they will not be hauled off to jail for prostitution, unlike streetwalkers, unless their official identification cards are invalid. In order to work in the clubs, a woman must go to the local police station to register her name and address and the name of the club where she will be working. She must also go to the local VD clinic, undergo gynecological and blood examinations and receive a VD card. To maintain her status as a"healthy" hostess, she must go once a week for VD examination and get her card stamped"healthy" by the clinic;"healthy" means she is free of VD infection. She pays for each clinic visit, and if she fails the exam, she cannot work in the club-- she must also pay for medical treatment--until the clinic certifies that she is"healthy." The club woman must carry the registration and VD cards with her at all times. The Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (MoHSA, formerly called the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare) has been supervising the formulation and enforcement of these regulations since the early-mid 1960s, but until the early 1970s, enforcement was highly inconsistent throughout the numerous camptowns. Prior to the 1960s, U.S. medics conducted VD examinations of the women; even in the 1970s, U.S. camps in areas where the Korean authorities were lax about such regulations continued to check the prostitutes. Once in the club, the woman's life revolves around the schedule of the local GIs and the business demands of the club owner or manager, who serves as her pimp. On a typical weekday, she dresses and puts on her make-up in mid-afternoon in preparation for the GIs who "pour out of the [camp] gates at the end of the [work]day." 5 From around 4 or 5 p.m. until midnight to 2 a.m., she sells drinks, flirts and dances with men, and solicits customers for the night club-- she must also pay for medical treatment--until the clinic certifies that she is"healthy." The club woman must carry the registration and VD cards with her at all times. The Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (MoHSA, formerly called the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare) has been supervising the formulation and enforcement of these regulations since the early-mid 1960s, but until the early 1970s, enforcement was highly inconsistent throughout the numerous camptowns. Prior to the 1960s, U.S. medics conducted VD examinations of the women; even in the 1970s, U.S. camps in areas where the Korean authorities were lax about such regulations continued to check the prostitutes. Once in the club, the woman's life revolves around the schedule of the local GIs and the business demands of the club owner or manager, who serves as her pimp. On a typical weekday, she dresses and puts on her make-up in mid-afternoon in preparation for the GIs who"pour out of the [camp] gates at the end of the [work]day." 5 From around 4 or 5 p.m. until midnight to 2 a.m., she sells drinks, flirts and dances with men, and solicits customers for the night. On the weekends, her workday begins earlier and ends later. The club owner/manager requires the woman to sell as many drinks to GIs as possible--alcohol for the men and "ladies' drinks" (usually soft drinks) for herself. Ladies' drinks are particularly high-priced, now about $5 a small glass; the goal is to get the GI to buy many drinks in order to increase the club's revenues. Historically, women have received 10 to 20% of the income from the drinks they sell. 6 Many clubs have drink quotas for the women: if they do not sell at least 150 drinks per month, they do not receive their share of the revenues. In some clubs, if a woman sells more than 600 drinks in a month, she gets a gold ring; if she sells more than 1,000 drinks in a month, she receives a"special bonus." 7 Pushing drinks on the soldiers means the woman also has to keep drinking; on the average, a club woman drinks 20 glasses of soft drinks and/or a mixture of whiskey per night. 8 Moreover, to sell drinks, she must mingle with various GIs in one night, fondling them and being fondled by them in return. On the average, in the mid-1990s, clubs were paying a hostess $250 a month. 9 Selling drinks, however, has never been the mainstay of the women's earnings: Women are expected to sleep with GIs for the bulk of their income because their cut from selling drinks cannot support them, and"[m]any places don't pay any salary." 10 In Uijongbu in the mid-1980s,"long-time" (overnight) was $20, while"short- time" (hourly rate) was $10. 11 Owners and pimps generally take 80% and give the prostitute 20% of her earnings per trick. Most women do not come into the clubs equipped with "hostessing skills" and the willingness to share flesh with GIs. For women who are new to the club scene, an initiation process often takes place. Some women attest to having been raped by their pimp/manager; others have been ordered by the club owner to sleep with a particular soldier; yet others stumble into bed with GIs on their own; some receive advice on the type of man to avoid (e.g., violent types) from more experienced prostitutes. In Let the Good Times Roll, " Ms. Pak" expresses her confusion, curiosity, and fear at beginning work at a GI club in Osan. Although she had sold her body to Korean men before entering the kijich'on, she had a difficult time adjusting to her new situation--she had never seen an American before and worried how she could handle their large bodies. 12 Black men were even more strange to her. At the prospect of her first black patron, she wondered to herself how dark his penis would be and"If I do it with him, will my skin turn black?" 13 Her first sexual encounter with an American took place at the order of her club owner, who "warned that I had to do it." 14 Most of the women have taken to alcohol or drugs to help them get through their sex work. 15 Sometimes women pick up customers; at other times, the GIs express their interest in a particular woman to the club owner/manager, who then tells the woman to sleep with the soldier. The GI and club woman go to her room, which is usually attached to or located near the club. Her room is part of a complex of rooms lined up in a row and separated by very thin walls; other prostitutes live in those rooms. The complex usually belongs to the club owner, who places a watchman or -woman by the entrance to monitor who goes in and out, to receive payments for the sex, and to insure that no woman runs away. In some of the older complexes,"pimp holes" were made in the rooms so that the pimp or monitor could watch over the woman while she sold sex and make sure that she was not scheming with the GI to run away. Moreover, such peeping Tom activities were intended to prevent GIs from avoiding payment--many GIs would claim that the the prostitute never "put out," even if the woman had provided the agreed-upon sexual service. Both the prostitutes and U.S. military officials have observed that club women aggressively seek out customers. In Camp Arirang, Kim Yonja recalls how she and other women grabbed onto men in order to make money. One U.S. Army chaplain commented that"in Korea, the guy is inundated with prostitutes." 16 And an Army captain who had served in Korea during the early 1980s noted that young, inexperienced enlistees were most susceptible to getting duped into serious relationships with prostitutes who sought to"exploit the boys for money." 17 How prostitutes fare physically, financially, and emotionally in the kijich'on environment depends to a great extent on the particular club owner/manager and GI customers she encounters. As"Nanhee" says, some GIs are mean and nasty, especially when they are drunk; others are nice and gentle. 18 At worst, a woman encounters a GI who beats her and murders her, as Yun Kumi did in October 1992. Private Kenneth Markle was convicted of killing her; her landlord found her body--"naked, bloody, and covered with bruises and contusions--with laundry detergent sprinkled over the crime site. In addition, a coke bottle was embedded in Yun's uterus and the trunk of an umbrella driven 27 cm into her rectum." 19 At best, a GI provides money and other necessities, is faithful and caring and ultimately marries her."Oon Kyung," who had married"Jack," was one of the lucky ones. He had"scrape[d] and save[d] to pay to get Oon Kyung out of a club." 20 Afterward,"he work[ed] alongside guys who had slept with her when she was working as a prostitute before they were married." 21 No club woman I spoke with ever referred to club owners and managers as nice, kind, and gentle. Some are not as abusive as those who beat and rape the barwomen, but it is apparent that the owner/manager is responsible for the bulk of the everyday exploitation of the women. Ms. Pak states that"owners usually take advantage of [the women]" by not paying them their share of revenues from drinks and sex. 22 Women who move up in the hierarchy of sex work can become club managers, and they do not necessarily treat the prostitutes with compassion. Kim Yonja, who had worked as a madam in Kunsan, recalled how tough she had been on her hostesses; she had scolded them and pushed them to bring in income for the bar. 23 Thomas Kelly, a former GI and VD officer (he had to help the military track down prostitutes who were alleged to have transmitted the infection), noted how the madams would send out"slicky boys" to"rough up the girls who [didn't] pay [their club debts]." 24 The"debt bondage system" is the most prominent manifestation of exploitation. A woman's debt increases each time she borrows money from the owner--to get medical treatment, to send money to her family, to cover an emergency, to bribe police officers and VD clinic workers. Most women also begin their work at a new club with large amounts of debt, which usually results from the"agency fee" and advance pay. Typically, (illegal) job placement agencies which specialize in bar and brothel prostitution place women in a club and charge the club owner a fee. The owner transfers the fee onto the new employee's"account" at usurious rates; Ms. Pak mentions one club owner charging 10%. 25 Often, women ask the owner for an advance in order to pay off her existing debts to another club, and the cycle of debt continues. Owners also set up a new employee with furniture, stereo equipment, clothing, and cosmetics--items deemed necessary for attracting GI customers. These costs get added to the woman's account with interest. In 1988, the left- leaning Mal Magazine (Malchi), reported that on the average, prostitutes' club debts range between one and four million won 26 ($1,462 and $5,847 respectively in 1988 terms). For this reason, women try to pick up as many GIs as possible night after night, and for this reason, women cannot leave prostitution at will. Nanhee sums up the debt-ridden plight: In some American [camptown] clubs, if you have no debt, they see to it that you incur some. If you had no debt, you would have the choice of going to another club, a better club. But if the woman has debts, she can't leave before she pays up. Escaping from a club isn't easy to do. The women with a conscience stay and work [to pay off the debt]. 27 The great majority of women who enter kijich'on prostitution have already experienced severe deprivation and abuse--poverty, rape, repeated beatings by lovers or husbands. The camp followers of the war era lived off their bodies and fed their family members with their earnings. Korean camptown officials who had lived through the war expressed sympathy for the early generations of prostitutes when I interviewed them in 1992.
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Women suffer constant and concealed abuse, denying them agency
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
To expect club owners and managers, who served as collective pimps for the hostesses working in their establishments, to educate these women was a naive assumption on the part of the U.S. military authorities. It was common knowledge among camptown residents, both American and Korean, that club owners' only concern for the women was their ability to increase club revenues. The U.S. side was fully aware that many club owners/managers mistreated the women by physically beating them, psychologically harassing them, and keeping them in debt bondage. Demanding that these owners/managers increase control over these women's conduct was tantamount to increasing and legitimating the former's exploitation and abuse of the latter. The former U.S. chair of the Subcommittee from December 1971 to October 1972 responded frankly to my question, "What kind of carrots and sticks were used to enforce nondiscrimination by club women?" Answer: "Generally, a visit to the bar owner would either get her fired or get her head screwed on straight. Give pressure to the bar owner and they usually carried through." 32 Besides the power of hiring and firing, the club owner had other means of cutting off a prostitute's livelihood, e.g., confiscating her VD/registration card so that she would not be able to work. Kim Yonja stated that because most club women avoided the monthly "Etiquette and Good Conduct" lecture, some club owners/managers helped out the local Korean authorities who sponsored the meeting by confiscating the club women's VD cards as a way to force the women to attend: "If there were going to be a meeting tomorrow, then the owner would take away the VD card the night before, at closing time, and prohibit the women who don't go to the meeting from coming to work at the club for several days. Without the VD card, women could not work." 33 Another woman emphasized that there was virtually no legal or political recourse that women could take against the abuses: "If a woman is abused by the owner, unless the woman gets bruises that take months to heal, then, things just get covered up." 34 The women's limited power over their own lives was sharply reduced because of the political power the owners held over camptown life. According to Kim Yonja, who was active in the camptown politics of Kunsan and Songt'an in the 1970s and 1980s, Most club owners in camptowns are village leaders. They hold power. It's not that the original residents become the owners, but owners have arrived from other areas. By establishing their business and earning money, they become owners, Special Tourist Association leaders, etc. So, if a woman is physically abused by the owner, or if a woman is murdered by a GI, she had nowhere to turn to: She would be told (by the Korean authorities), "Look, the American soldier is here to help Korea-- they put their lives on the line for Korea." 35
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Prioritizing the military over women’s agency and quality of life, permeates all levels of US foreign policy
Katharine Moon is head of the Department of Political Science and Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College, 1997, (“Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations,” Columbia University Press)
In the late 1930s Virginia Woolf challenged the notion that states function to protect, preserve, and promote the interests of the people. Ahead of her time, she began the process of deconstructing the concepts, "national interest" and "national security." For her, "national interests" represented the interests of men, particularly the privileged, and "national security" did not eliminate the physical, economic, legal, and social insecurity of women. More than fifty years later, women and men echo Woolf's bold assertions. Contemporary feminist academics and activists, ranging from liberal critics of Realism to postmodernists, women and development advocates, and peace activists, all challenge the role and capacity of the sovereign state to know and best fulfill the needs and interests of a nation's people. With respect to women and security, Spike Peterson and Judith Stiehm go so far as to describe the modern state as a patriarchal protection racket, 6 and many Asian feminists living with U.S. military bases and camptown prostitution in their countries consider their states collective pimps. Feminists charge that states have made women's lives insecure by fixating on military buildup, stand-offs, and adventurism. They have noted that women, if given the chance, would define security less narrowly to include "safe working conditions and freedom from the threat of war or unemployment or the economic squeeze of foreign debt." 7 Mary Burguieres advocates feminist approaches to peace which would espouse Johann Galtung's conceptualization of peace as "an absence of both personal and structural violence." 8 She adds that such approaches are important because they "loosen" governmental policies for peace from their "exclusive association with defence and foreign policy" and link peace efforts with social policy in general. 9 My interviews with Korean former prostitutes support the basic feminist claim that states' definition of "national security" is often irrelevant to the security of women's lives, and that state pursuits on behalf of national security often exploit and oppress women. The kijich'on women ridiculed the Korean government's efforts in the Clean-Up Campaign to label them as "personal ambassadors" and their selling of sex as patriotic service. Most women admitted that they were unsure of the meaning of "national security" (kukka anbo) and that governmental actions generally were oblivious to their needs for physical and economic well- being. Kim Yonja, a 25-year veteran of camptown prostitution, sharply articulated that the Korean and U.S. governments' rationales for or public professions of security policies had no connection to the actual needs of camptown women for protection. All of the women I interviewed stated that their greatest need for ROK government protection (after the Korean War) was not from North Korean threats but the exploitation and abuse of club owners/pimps, local Korean police and VD clinic officials, and the power of the U.S. bases. In other words, they needed protection from a Korean law enforcement system that inadequately provided for their legal, economic, political, and human rights and a Korean government too cowardly and self-interested to protect them against violence and abuse by U.S. soldiers. Rather than feeling protected by the Korean government and U.S. soldiers, all of the women stated they felt used and betrayed by both Korean and U.S. authorities. The first of the two most common complaints against the U.S. military was that the Americans, who were in Korea to help Koreans, considered the women mere sex toys, concerned only with the health and well-being of the GI. The second was the violence of the U.S. soldiers toward the women and the lack of legal accountability on the part of the military authorities for the soldiers' criminal behavior. Mrs. Ch'oe recalled that she had been beaten by a U.S. serviceman and had reported the incident to the Korean police and the U.S. military police but that the soldier was allowed to go free. In Mrs. Pak's case, she experienced the irresponsibility and injustice of the U.S. military authorities in the extreme. Her sister, also a camptown prostitute in Osan, was mutilated and murdered allegedly by a U.S. serviceman in the early 1970s, but U.S. authorities never turned the man over to the ROK authorities (as provisioned in the Status of Forces Agreement) to be tried in the ROK legal system. Mrs. Pak bitterly recounted that the U.S. military offered neither apology nor financial compensation to her family and that camptown residents had to collect money from one another to pay for the funeral expenses. According to Mrs. Pak: "U.S. law in the U.S. was good--but in Korea, it was never upheld. The U.S. lawyers simply protected U.S. soldiers but did not seek the truth and real justice. The U.S. government did not give any compensation to Koreans for the wrongs that U.S. soldiers committed." All the women emphatically repeated that the ROK government did nothing to improve their welfare. They particularly complained against the impotence and/or unwillingness of the Korean police to prevent abuses against the women and to help them leave prostitution. Mrs. Chang stated that when she had tried to run away from her club owner and had gone to the local police for help, the police kept her in the station overnight, then called her owner to come get her. The owner showed up at the station and "dragged her back to the club." 11
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This patriarchal framework drives and sustains wars
Karen J. Warren, Philosophy Professor, Macalester, and Duane L. Cady, Philosophy Professor, Hamline U., Spring 94, Hypatia 9:2
Conceptually, a feminist perspective suggests that patriarchal conceptual frameworks and the behavior they give rise to, are what sanction, maintain, and perpetuate "isms of domination"-sexism, racism, classism, warism,4 naturism5 and the coercive power-over institutions and practices necessary to maintain these "isms." If this is correct, then no account of peace is adequate which does not reveal patriarchal conceptual frameworks; they underlie and sustain war and conflict resolution strategies. (Examples of why we think this is correct are laced throughout the remainder of the paper.) One glaring example of how the dominant cultural outlook manifests this oppressive conceptual framework is seen in macho, polarized, dichotomized attitudes toward war and peace. Pacifists are dismissed as naive, soft wimps; warriors are realistic, hard heroes. War and peace are seen as opposites. In fact few individual warists or pacifists live up to these exaggerated extremes. This suggests a reconceptualization of values along a continuum which allows degrees of pacifism and degrees of justification for war (Cady 1989).
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And you must prioritize our impacts. They can’t access our depth of the effects of militarism against women. The negative distracts from the widespread state-sponsored violence.
Cuomo, Chris J. Associate Professor of Philosophy and member of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Cincinnati. War is not just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence. 5-27-1996
In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances. Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analysis. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state
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And set the bar high for their DAs. Their impacts overlook the value of human life in their neutralizing conception of the world.
Jack Donnelly, College of the Holy Cross, The Concept of Human Rights, 1985, p. 55-58
Basic moral and political rights are not just weighting factors in utilitarian calculations that deal with an undifferentiated 'happiness'. Rather, they are demands and constraints of a different order, grounded in an essentially substantive judgement of the conditions necessary for human development and flourishing. They also provide means - rights - for realising human potentials. The neutrality of utilitarianism, its efforts to assure that everyone counts 'equally', results in no-one counting as a person; as Robert E. Goodin puts it, people drop out of utilitarian calculations, which are instead about disembodied In Aristotelian terms, utilitarianism errs in basing its judgements on 'numerical' rather than 'proportional' equality. For our purposes, such differences should be highlighted. Therefore, let us consider utilitarianism, whether act or rule, as an alternative to rights in general, and thus human rights as well. In particular, we can consider utility and human rights as competing strategies for limiting the range of legitimate state action. Once again, Bentham provides a useful focus for our discussion. While Bentham insists on the importance of limiting the range of legitimate state action (1838:11, 495, VIII, .557 ff.), he also insists that (natural) rights do not set those limits. In fact, he argues that construed as limits on the state, natural rights 'must ever be, - the rights of anarchy', justifying insurrection whenever a single right is violated (1838:11, 522, 496, 501, 506). For Bentham, natural rights are absolute rights, and thus inappropriate to the real world of political action. In fact, though, no major human rights theorist argues that they are absolute. For example, Locke holds that the right to revolution is reserved by society, not the individual (1967: para. 243). Therefore, individual violations of human rights per se do not justify revolution. Furthermore, Locke supports revolution only in cases of gross, persistent and systematic violations of natural rights (1967: paras 204, 207, 225), as does Paine. The very idea of absolute rights is absurd from a human rights perspective, since logically there can be at most one absolute right, unless we (unreasonably) assume that rights never come into conflict. A more modest claim would be that human rights are 'absolute' in the sense that they override all principles and practices except other human rights. Even this doctrine, however, is rejected by most if not all major human rights theorists and documents. For example, Article I of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, after declaring that 'men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights', adds that 'civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility', thus recognising restrictions on the continued complete equality of rights. Similarly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 29) permits such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and free- doms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes a similar general limiting proviso (Article 4) as well as particular limitations on most of the enumerated rights. Rights ordinarily 'trump' other considerations, but the mere presence of a right - even a basic human right - does not absolutely and automatically determine the proper course of action, all things considered. In certain exceptional circumstances, needs, utility, interests or righteousness may override rights. The duties correlative to rights, and even the trumping force of rights, are prima facie only. But other principles also have prima facie moral force. Sometimes this will be sufficient to overcome even the special entrenched priority of rights. The obligations arising from such rights therefore ought not to be discharged, all things considered. In such cases, we can speak of the right being 'infringed', since the (prima facie) obligation correlative to the right is not discharged, but it would be seriously misleading to say that it had been 'violated' (Thomson 1976, 1977). But if even basic human rights can be justifiably infringed, aren't rights ultimately subservient to utility? If recalcitrant political realities sometimes require subordinating natural rights, aren't we simply suggesting that human rights are merely utopian aspirations inappropriate to a world in which dirty hands are often a requirement of political action - and thus where utility is the only reasonable guide? Such a response misconstrues the relationship between rights and utility and the ways in which rights are overridden. Consider a very simple case, involving minor rights that on their face would seem to be easily overridden. If A promises to drive B and C to the movies but later changes his mind, in deciding whether to keep his promise (and discharge his rights-based obligations). A must consider more than the relative utilities of both courses of action for all the parties affected; in most cases, he ought to drive them to the movies even if that would reduce overall utility. At the very least he must ask them to excuse him from his obligation, this requirement (as well as the power to excuse) being a reflection of the right-holder's control over the rights relationship. Utility alone usually will not override even minor rights; we require more than a simple calculation of utility to justify infringing rights. The special priority of rights/titles, as we have seen, implies that the quality, not just the quantity, of the countervailing forces (utilities) must be taken into consideration. For example, if, when the promised time comes, A wants instead to go get drunk with some other friends, simply not showing up to drive B and C to the movies will not be justifiable even if that would maximise utility; the desire for a drunken binge is not a consideration that ordinarily will justifiably override rights. But if A accompanies an accident victim to the hospital, even if A is only one of several passers-by who stopped to offer help, and his action proves to be of no real benefit to the victim, usually this will be a sufficient excuse, even if utility would be maximised by A going to the movies. Therefore, even recasting rights as weighted interests (which would seem to be the obvious utilitarian 'fix' to capture the special priority of rights) still misses the point, because it remains essentially quantitative. Rights even tend to override an accumulation of comparable or parallel interests. Suppose that sacrificing a single innocent person with a rare blood factor could completely and permanently cure ten equally innocent victims of a disease that produces a sure, slow and agonising death. Each of the eleven has the 'same' right to life. Circumstances require, however, that a decision be made as to who will live and who will die. The natural rights theorist would almost certainly choose to protect the rights of the one individual - and such a conclusion, when faced with the scapegoat problem, is one of the greatest virtues of a natural rights doctrine to its advocates. This conclusion rests on a qualitative judgement that establishes the right, combined with the further judgement that it is not society's role to infringe such rights simply to foster utility, a judgement arising from the special moral priority of rights. Politically, such considerations are clearest in the case of extremely unpopular minorities. For example, plausible arguments can be made that considerations of utility would justify persecution of selected religious minorities (e.g. Jews for centuries in the West, Mormons in nineteenth-century America, Jehovah's Witnesses in contemporary Malawi), even giving special weight to the interests of members of these minorities and considering the precedents set by such persecutions. None the less, human rights demand that an essentially qualitative judgement be made that such persecutions are incompatible with a truly human life and cannot be allowed - and such judgements go a long way to explaining the relative appeal of human rights theories. But suppose that the sacrifice of one innocent person would save not ten but a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million people. All things considered, trading one innocent life for a million, even if the victim resists most forcefully, would seem to be not merely justifiable but demanded. Exactly how do we balance rights (in the sense of 'having a right'), wrongs (in the sense of 'what is right') and interests? Do the numbers count? If so, why, and in what way? If not, why not? Ultimately the defender of human rights is forced back to human nature, the source of natural or human rights. For a natural rights theorist there are certain attributes, potentialities and holdings that are essential to the maintenance of a life worthy of a human being. These are given the special protection of natural rights; any 'utility' that might be served by their infringement or violation would be indefensible, literally inhuman - except in genuinely extraordinary circumstances, the possibility of which cannot be denied, but the probability of which should not be overestimated. Extraordinary circumstances do force us to admit that, at some point, however rare, the force of utilitarian considerations builds up until quantity is transformed into quality. The human rights theorist, however, insists on the extreme rarity of such cases. Furthermore, exotic cases should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental difference in emphasis (and in the resulting judgements in virtually all cases) between utility and (human) rights. Nor should they be allowed to obscure the fact that on balance the flaws in rights-based theories and practices seem less severe, and without a doubt less numerous, than those of utility-based political strategies.
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Treat negative arguments with skepticism – the data behind their arguments are politically biased to prop up the current system of subordinating women’s concerns
Tickner 6, Feminist Methodologies or International Relations, J. Ann Ticker: Professor, School of IR at USC, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press p. 37
These two cases, as with most feminist IR research, have avoided quantitative methods. As my case studies have demonstrated, fitting women and other marginalized people into methodologically conventional quantitative frameworks has been problematic. Many of the experiences of women’s lives have not yet been documented or analyzed, either within social science disciplines or by states. The choices that states make about ‘which data to collect is a political act. Traditional ways in which data are collected and analyzed do not lend themselves to answering many of the questions that feminists raise. The data that are available to scholars and, more importantly, the data that are not, determine which research questions get asked and how they are answered. Marilyn Waring describes how national accounting systems have been shaped and reshaped to help states frame their national security policies — specifically to understand how to pay for wars.22 In national accounting systems no value is attached to the environment, to unpaid work, to the reproduction of human life, or to its maintenance or care, tasks generally undertaken by women (Waring 1988: 3—4). Political decisions are made on the basis of data that policy elites choose to collect (Waring 1988: 302). Waring goes on to assert that, under the guise of value-free science, the economics of accounting has constructed a reality which believes that “value” results only when (predominantly) men interact with the marketplace (Waring 1988: 17— 18).
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Solvency:
The securitizing forced prostitution is uniquely damaging and must be resisted in all instances.
Sealing Cheng is a Sealing Cheng is the Henry Luce Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Department. She joined Wellesley in spring 2005. Her courses include: Introduction to Women’s Studies; Global Feminism; Love and Intimacy; and Asian Women on the Move. 2010, “On the move for love : migrant entertainers and the U.S. military in South Korea” (Pensylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Gijédmn-U.S. military camptown in South Korea-are not “really” what Korea is about. For example. My twenty-year-old Seoul National University friend told me that I as a foreigner, should not be going there because he felt ashamed of them; my sixty-year old landlord just frowned and turned her face away the few times I talked about my trips to Dongducheon; and a senior Korean anthropologist asked me to studydusa (ancestor worship) and shamanism instead if I “really wanted to learn about Ko-rean culture.” These reactions illuminated for me howgijichon symbolizes the antith- esis of what the ideal Korean nation should be. From the perspective of Koreans who shared in so many ways. The national discourse of economic suceess and globalization in the late 1990s, foreigners who want to learn about Korea should do so either through its heritage (shemanism, ancestral rites), through its economic achievement in becoming one of the Aslan miracles of the 1980s, or both. Politically. U.S. military presence in violates the ideal of national sovereignty. Culturally and socially, gijchon challenges the homogenous ideal of the nation that state and popular discourses promote. Katherine Moon has describe gijchon as “neither America nor Korea”-“hybrid towns, poaaesaing elements of America and Korea in the border of the residents. English and Korean language store signs. U.S. military slogans and logos juxtaposed with dolls garbed in traditional Korean dress."' In other words, their hybridity is in- consistent with the imagined nation. Koreans-not just giiichon women working as hostesses in the clubs, but everyone whose livelihood depends on the presence and needs of the U.S. military-therefore become internal. Geographically a part of South Korea, gijidron is politically. culturally, and socially a borderland, and gijchon Koreans are best kept on the margins of the nation. From the perspective of the anthropologist, this common tendency in mainstream Korean society to demarcate gijidson as "un-Korean” and (therefore) a site of danger makes griichon an illuminating site For the study of the constructions of Korean nationhood and oontagion. Mary Douglas suggests in Purity and Danger that "ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions have as their main function to im- pose system on an inherently untidy scenario, certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagion. Gijchon speaks neither to the pride nor the sucess of South Korea as a modern nation-state. In fact. it interferes with the dominant fantasy of a globalized. modem South Korea. What gijidson represents, therefore, is what needs to be purged from the Korean nation. Foreign presence is a constant source of “internal cultural debates"’ about the nation. ln 2008 the world was surprised by the nicely candlelit vigils of millions in Seoul protesting the suspension of the ban against U.S. beef imports on the grounds of health concerns about madcow disease. U.S. and Korean, including Secretary of State Condoleeua Rice, repeated that the beef was safe but were oblivious to the het that the protestors’ concerns went way beyond the beeé in 2008 “mad cow" symbolized South Korean discontent about both domestic politics and relations with the United States. Apart from accusations that the South Korean govemment outlawed to U.S. demands so lift the ban in return for a Free Trade Agreement, the neollberal principles of privatization and redevelopment championed by President Lee Myung-balt promised eco- nomic and physical displacement for many, at a time when me South Ko- rean economy was reaching stagllation.
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In particular, US military officials prop up the current framework of masculinity. Only a movement against Korean prostitution would open up the possibility to reevaluate US foreign policy at a global level.
Gwyn Kirk is a founder member of Women for Genuine Security and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. 3-14-08, “Gender and U.S. Bases in Asia-Pacific,” (http://www.fpif.org/articles/gender_and_us_bases_in_asia-pacific, Foreign Policy in Focus)
For the U.S. military, land and bodies are so much raw material to use and discard without responsibility or serious consequences to those in power. Regardless of gender, soldiers are trained to dehumanize others so that, if ordered, they can kill them. Sexual abuse and torture committed by U.S. military personnel and contractors against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison illustrate a grim new twist on militarized violence, where race and nation “trumped” gender. White U.S. women were among the perpetrators, thereby appropriating the masculinized role. The violated Iraqi men, meanwhile, were forced into the feminized role. Gendered inequalities, which are fundamental to U.S. military operations in the Asia-Pacific region, affect men as well as women. Young men who live near U.S. bases see masculinity defined in military terms. They may work as cooks or bartenders who provide rest and relaxation to visiting servicemen. They may be forced to migrate for work to larger cities or overseas, seeking to fulfill their dreams of giving their families a better future. U.S. peace movements should not only address U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world. Communities in the Asia-Pacific region have a long history of contesting U.S. militarism and offer eloquent testimonies to the negative impact of U.S. military operations there. These stories provide insights into the gendered dynamics of U.S. foreign and military policy, and the complicity of allied nations in this effort.
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We must contesting patriarchy in the debate space is critical to solve for status quo. A vote affirmative can bring about similar revolutions.
Jarvis 2000 D. S. L. Jarvis, 2000. [University of South Carolina Press, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline, p 155].
For feminists the most immediate remedy to masculinist androcentrism in International Relations and global politics is, then, an empirical one: add more women and stir. Reconstituting International Relations in fundamentally new ways involves bringing more women into the academy and into positions of power in international politics. By adding more female researchers, for example, feminists argue the proclivity to "malestream" theory can be checked by breaking down the boys' dub syndrome .71 Gender equity that and affirmative action policies as a means to engineer socially an end to overt discrimination have thus been the first order of business. From here, feminist women, "less bounded by any narrow disciplinary 156 International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism lens," can then "examine insights from diverse locations, situate them in larger transdisciplinarv contexts, and weave new understandings out of these multiple threads" by virtue of the "episternic advantage" they enjoy over men knowers.74 This, of course, is not just about more female representation as so-called empirical feminists would argue, but, from the perspective of standpoint feminists, about the ontological primacy of "women as knowers" combined with an attempt "to eliminate the fascism in our heads... build upon the open qualities of human discourse, and thereby intervene in the way knowledge is produced and constituted at the particular sites where a localized power-discourse prevails."' Equality in representation is only the first of many revolutions, a necessary-but-hardly sufficient condition to meet the challenges of thinking differently about how we think and know, and a recognition of how "gender both creates and reproduces a world of multiple inequalities that today threatens all of us."' Thus, "the task of ungendering power," notes Peterson, "is twofold-adding women to the existing world politics power structures and transforming those very power structures, ideologically and materially." This project has been common enough in International Relations, evidenced by increasing calls for more women researchers, more feminist analyses of international politics, and increased efforts to bring gendered perspectives and issues to bear upon the study of global events and processes. Yet, if these attempts appear diverse, all tend to be analogous, united by the common penchant to "reclaim the private." "The personal is political," writes Enloe, echoing the words of Susan Moller Okin.7' "Feminist tracings of early state formation," for example, have sought to highlight the "emergence and consolidation of public political power and the centralisation of authority" which concomitantly "constituted a sepa- rate domestic or private sphere that came to be associated with women and the feminine."" This false public/private dichotomy feminists see as an artificial dualism intended to sideline women into domestic servitude while depoliticizing the domestic sphere. That the "personal is political," suggests Enloe, means "that politics is not shaped merely by what happens in legislative debates, voting booths or war rooms." Rather, men, "who dominate public life, have told women to stay in the kitchen,. . . [and] have used their public power to construct private relationships in ways that [bolster] their masculinized political control."' Historically, men have thus appropriated public/political power, thereby denying women a legit- imate political voice and making them dependent. New feminist under- standings and research thus attempt to show how a reclamation of the private as political redefines the questions of International Relations and yr. Feminist Revisions of International Relations 157 the research agenda's scholars should otherwise be engaged with. "Accept- ing that the political is personal prompts one to investigate the politics of marriage, venereal disease and homosexuality," claims Enloc, "not as mar- ginal issues, but as matters central to the state. Doing this type of research becomes just as serious as studying military weaponry or taxation policy." The cult of masculinity, as V. Spike Peterson terms it, extends down into the depths of what otherwise appears as natural or given. The "cult of motherhood" and the notion of "women's work," for example, represent patriarchal norms culturally ingrained in the modem nation-state that jus- tifies "structural violence-inadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sex segregated wages, rights, and resources" for women .12 Indeed, for Peterson, the state is complicit in structural violence, albeit indirectly, "through its promotion of masculinist, heterosexist, and classist ideolo- gies-expressed, for example, in public education models, media images, the militarism of culture, welfare policies, and patriarchal law." Through "its selective sanctioning of nonstate violence, particularly in its policy of nonintervention in domestic violence," and through direct male brutality like "murder, rape, battering, [and] incest," Peterson claims that male domination is constantly reproduced, reaffirming the subjugation of wo-men as "the objects of masculinist social control." Reclaiming these "private spaces," events, and acts as public-political spaces demystifies the patriarchal base of the state and how it constructs and manipulates "the ideology describing public and private life." More importantly, this strategy opens up International Relations to a multiplicity of subjects, issues, and research agendas with all of them attempting to disrupt the boundaries imposed by the "radical bifurcation of asymmetrical public and private spheres"; so begins the project of "ungendering world politics.""